Today's Date:

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CHALLENGES

The world, as we can see, is not just changing, evolving. It is in disarray. Nations in crisis, ethnic and religious conflicts, proliferation, trafficking, terrorism: this isn’t the whole picture of the globalized world. But it is this, too, presenting risks and challenges – the most visible and violent ones, which I have just mentioned, but others too, which we have to grasp and understand better. On this depends our planet’s stability, and the values which have continually inspired our diplomatic action.

I shall distinguish between three sets of challenges.

DEVELOPMENT/ENVIRONMENT/MAJOR PANDEMICS/POVERTY/FAMINE

In the first place, there are the challenges of development, because they often lie at the root of all the others.

The first of these challenges is a silent one. But it is the most implacable, and I have long considered it the most important.

It is the damage being caused to our environment, our ecosystem. Strong words have been spoken, particularly at the Johannesburg summit by President Chirac: “our house is burning down and we’re blind to it”.

We haven’t got a spare planet. And yet we’re polluting – often unwittingly, always irreversibly – the air we breathe, the water we drink, the earth which feeds us. Our climate is deteriorating and, with it, the whole of our ecological system.

What do we talk about, what do you talk about, during our visits, those you organize? The rapid deterioration of the environment, desertification and water shortages jeopardizing the development of many nations. Everywhere, distress signals are being lit: the Congo and Niger basins, the Arctic, and primary Amazon rainforest. Space itself is starting to become cluttered with the debris of human activity.

Protecting the environment is a matter of urgency for everyone. But it’s the duty of the wealthiest. Since, at both urban and world level, environmental deterioration is going hand in hand with and exacerbating social injustice. Today, a billion people haven’t access to drinking water, and two and a half billion to sanitation. Anyone imagining that this has or would not have any bearing on political and social unrest in many parts of the world is labouring under a very serious delusion.

Environmental protection is a vital diplomatic objective. It is and will be the subject of increasingly tough, but increasingly essential international negotiations.

This is why we need a specific United Nations organization for the environment. I shall be having a meeting on this soon in New York with thirty or so of my most committed and most motivated colleagues. This is why we shall be devoting our next conference, in 2005, to this subject, the sustainable development challenge.

Another development challenge – they go together – is that of the major pandemics striking every nation.

But they do not all have the means to defend themselves. The poorest nations are the most powerless in the face of AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. Today in Africa the ravages of AIDS are creating a genuine "duty to assist a people in danger". In eight countries, life expectancy is no longer higher than forty. The world epidemic has claimed twenty million lives since 1981. There is an urgent need to release funds for training and prevention, to make intellectual property rights more flexible so as to open up wider access to medicines – we, France will be doing this in the 2005 budget.

In this respect, diplomats have an essential job to do, at the WTO, the United Nations and WHO. Finally, development necessitates action to combat poverty and famine. And it's always Africa, afflicted by droughts and conflicts, which suffers the most. I shall not dwell on the additional damage the invasions of migratory locusts are causing at this very moment.

In twenty years' time, President Konaré was warning recently – and he kept on repeating these figures – Africa will have 1.5 billion inhabitants. A billion of them will "live" – if I may use the word – on less than a euro a day. Eight hundred million will be under fifteen years old...

Obviously, all this concerns us. And, for me, there's no place for fatalism.

CONFLICTS/WMD/ARMS TRAFFICKING/ORGANIZED CRIME/TERRORISM

The second set of challenges confronting us is related to the conflicts.

The open conflicts such as those in the Middle East, Iraq, but also in the Great Lakes, Darfur and Central Asia. The risks of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The more insidious developments like arms trafficking and organized crime rings.

And of course, terrorism – a threat which has materialized in Madrid, Bali, Karachi and Iraq's major towns. The only possible response to this "faceless" violence is an international one, based on cooperation between police forces and justice systems, the exchange of intelligence and strengthening of international conventions.

All new areas – for us, for you – for diplomatic action, all areas too for "diplomatic courage". I'm thinking here of several of you, your staffs, our expatriate compatriots and their families who are experiencing conflicts or risky situations and are demonstrating a great deal of sang-froid.

FRENCH IDENTITY AND GOAL/SOCIETY/FRANCOPHONY/CULTURAL PLURALISM/ECONOMY/EU CONSTITUTION

Finally, the last set of challenges concerns, more generally, the life of our societies: and here too, on these societal issues, France must be proud of having an identity and a goal.

On Francophony, i.e. the promotion of a language which is not ours alone and whose universal role is an asset for those using French as a common language.

On cultural pluralism, which quite simply reflects the world's diversity. In the economic sphere we know that fair competition requires rules. The cultural sphere too needs diversity and rules to guarantee every people's right to its identity and difference.

France's identity and goal too when we seek balance, patiently and doggedly, between freedom and regulation, and in the first place in Europe which is crucial to our economic future. Advocating an untrammelled liberalism misunderstands the European economic and social model. There can be no modernization in this field without concern for cohesion. And it’s only if this balance is secured that European societies will more resolutely accept the path mapped out in Lisbon for our continent's competitiveness and growth.

And in a few months’ time we are going to embark on the task of explaining and defending the text of the European Constitution precisely because it guarantees this balance.

Those, in just a few words, are the new areas in which we have to act.

PRINCIPLES GOVERNING FRENCH ACTION

Confronted with these challenges, of rather different natures, I should now like to reiterate the principles which govern our action and we want to get others to share:

RULE OF LAW/COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY

- first of all, our determination to observe the rule of law and win support, within the international community, for the principle of collective responsibility. Recent experience shows us that lack of agreement, particularly between members of the United Nations Security Council, hinders success. (...) It is time to improve the legitimacy and efficacy of the world democracy slowly being built at the Security Council as in the other UN institutions

RESPECT FOR CULTURES AND DIALOGUE/EMERGING COUNTRIES/REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS

With respect for the law, there is a second principle: respect for cultures and dialogue. Firm belief in this principle driven by the requirement for tolerance and respect for the Other lies behind an operational principle I want to talk about. Since in this pluralist world this desire for dialogue necessitates France being capable of developing increasingly substantive relations with all the emerging countries at the heart of their regions: Brazil and Mexico in Latin America, South Africa and Nigeria in Africa, and India and China in Asia.

We shall continue, keeping this operational principle in mind, supporting the regional organizations which, going beyond their economic objectives, are playing a growing political role. How can one not be struck by the increasingly constructive contributions the African Union and ECOWAS are making in crises like those of Darfur, the Great Lakes and Côte d'Ivoire? How can one fail to notice, vis-à-vis the Greater Middle East initiative, the realistic and moderate support of the members of the Arab League which helped steer the Sea Island Summit conclusions in the right direction?

EU/CONSTITUTION

And then there is the European Union which is now the natural framework for our influence and greatly extending it. Today, the enlarged, completed Europe has given itself, through its first-ever Constitution, new foreign and defence policy instruments. It has to take, it's going to take its full place in the international area and, if it has the requisite political will, it's going to play a real role, like the world's major political players, in resolving the world's conflicts.

Let's make no mistake here. Our partners are asking us to do this. By pooling their actions and initiatives, and starting with our consular networks, all the European countries are giving themselves a far greater capacity for action than each would have on its own. If it succeeds in pooling its action in this way, the European Union can tomorrow be a serious player in Haiti, in the countries of Africa and the Middle East. This prospect makes it all the more necessary to ratify the new Constitution and justifies the pluralist, republican, democratic campaign to explain it to our people, which the government will be mounting in the course of the next few months.

FRANCE/GERMANY/UK/SPAIN/ITALY/NEW EU STATES

But going beyond the decision on the Constitution, our European commitment demands that France conduct with Germany an exemplary and, in truth, irreplaceable dialogue. Let no one be in any doubt, we shall continue sustaining the Franco-German discourse. It's in our interest.

But this very special dialogue between us, French and Germans, must contribute to the progress of the whole European project, without excluding anyone. Not the United Kingdom, essential partner for the future of the Common Foreign and Security Policy in Europe. Not Spain, who is seeking this dialogue. Not Italy, with whom we founded this project. Not our new European Union partners, who won't be the least assiduous or least determined when it comes to their European ambition. (...)./.